Guest contributors
Salai Dokhar & Htar
The Indian government released an official itinerary of Min Aung Hlaing’s visit, prompting Myanmar nationals in New Delhi to organize a protest. Holding onto hope that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government might respect the will of the Myanmar people and cancel the trip, a large crowd took to the streets on May 29.
However, before demonstrators could reach their meeting point, they were intercepted and blocked by roughly 100 police officers. This incident underscores Modi’s stance on the crisis: prioritizing the military junta, which seized power in Naypyidaw over the democratic aspirations of the Myanmar people.
New Delhi’s superficial approach
India monitors the situation in Myanmar through at least five distinct institutional channels. However, these actors rely almost exclusively on mainstream media and direct engagements with the military regime, leaving interactions with resistance forces strictly informal.
Through this narrow lens, New Delhi has continuously overlooked the most critical question: why is this military junta fundamentally detrimental to both Myanmar and India’s long-term interests?
Burdened with multiple state responsibilities, Indian officials very often lack the capacity to gather and assess accurate, timely, and reliable ground-level information.
Consequently, India’s strategy, which supposedly aims to curb Chinese influence, merely rubber-stamps superficial proposals that mimic Beijing’s playbook.
This approach leaves India perpetually lagging China. India cannot match Beijing’s financial leverage and only reacts after China’s geopolitical moves have already materialized.
While some analysts view inviting Min Aung Hlaing as Myanmar’s “President” as a savvy move to outmaneuver China, it is a serious strategic miscalculation.
In reality, China has deliberately avoided granting formal state recognition to avoid widespread public hostility in Myanmar. By walking into the exact minefield Beijing chose to bypass, India has inadvertently allowed China to engineer a diplomatic rift between New Delhi and the Myanmar people.
At the expense of its allies
Faced with mounting economic friction with Western nations, Modi’s geopolitical alignments have drifted closer to China, raising a glaring question: Is New Delhi compromising its identity as a global democracy for apparent short-term economic interests?
Beijing commands total influence over factions that cannot afford to sever ties with Beijing, including the military junta, and ethnic armed groups operating along the Myanmar-China border.
India’s attempt to dilute Chinese influence by engaging with these actors is counterproductive, offering little strategic leverage while increasing transparency over New Delhi’s intentions.
Welcoming Min Aung Hlaing on an official state visit awards a “legitimacy bonus” to a tyrant, rejected by both the people of Myanmar and the international community.
While ASEAN and the UN have maintained a frustrating but tolerated diplomatic neutrality by engaging all stakeholders on both sides, India’s actions go a step further by extending an official head-of-state invitation, something even China and Russia have refrained from doing openly.
This approach also appears misaligned with the strategic assessments articulated within the QUAD framework.
At the QUAD Foreign Ministers’ meeting on May 26 in India, Myanmar was explicitly identified as a key source of regional instability, particularly due to cyber-scam networks, human trafficking, and wider transnational criminal activity linked to the ongoing conflict.
India’s subsequent engagement with the junta therefore risks weakening the coherence of this shared regional assessment.
Insiders suggest India’s decision was influenced by recent military setbacks faced by the resistance. The rapid liberation of numerous towns by revolutionary forces between late 2021 and 2023 was the culmination of strategic preparation that began immediately after the 2021 coup, demonstrating significant revolutionary momentum.
Conversely, following major defeats during Operation 1027, Min Aung Hlaing resorted to its dormant military conscription law in February 2024, to forcibly rebuild his depleted ranks, taking until 2026 to launch a counter-offensive.
When comparing operational timelines, the resistance forces have progressed at a pace comparable to that of the junta, despite Min Aung Hlaing freely weaponizing the national budget and forced conscription.
Yet the junta’s current counteroffensives have failed to reclaim territory on the scale of what it lost during Operation 1027. Diplomacy based purely on battlefield dynamics risks misreading reality on the ground and producing fundamentally flawed policy decisions.
Furthermore, the official meeting statement indicated that India intends to discuss rare earth resources. However, engaging directly with Naypyidaw on this front completely overlooks realities on the ground.
The vast majority of known rare earth deposits are located in areas controlled by the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) and the United Wa State Army (UWSA).
While exploration and testing have also been reported in territories held by the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), commercial availability in those sectors remains unconfirmed.
Consequently, while Beijing directly negotiates with these resistance groups for rare earths without seeking Naypyidaw’s approval, New Delhi is choosing to bargain with a regime that holds no actual jurisdiction over the resource—a striking testament to India’s profound lack of ground-level understanding in Myanmar.
India’s mega-projects
Currently, India’s vital Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project runs directly through territories controlled by Chin resistance forces and the Arakan Army (AA). Similarly, the India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway passes through critical hubs such as Tamu, Kalewa, Monywa, Mandalay, Naypyidaw, Bago, and Myawaddy.
While regime officials hold offices in some urban centers, the actual highways and transit corridors are heavily influenced or controlled by resistance forces.
Both projects were positioned to safely resume operations under stabilization provided by the AA and Chin forces. By offering Min Aung Hlaing diplomatic legitimacy, India risks triggering a significant backlash, and the junta’s potential retaliatory offensives could further paralyze these economic corridors.
By upgrading this visit to an official state reception, India risks undermining the trust of the Myanmar people, endangering its future economic assets inside a liberated Myanmar and in a post-junta future.
Furthermore, by turning a blind eye to the junta’s horrific human rights violations, India risks damaging its own democratic reputation and diminishing Prime Minister Modi’s global standing.
Ultimately, India’s diplomatic gamble yields limited strategic benefit. It grants Min Aung Hlaing a badge of diplomatic legitimacy that even Moscow and Beijing have been cautious to formalize openly, while deepening divisions between the peoples of India and Myanmar.
This state visit is fundamentally different from Prime Minister Modi’s previous brief encounter with Min Aung Hlaing in Thailand during a meeting after the March 28 earthquake, which drew no protest due to its informal, humanitarian nature.
By contrast, bypassing a systematic analysis to engage in a way perceived as mimicking China represents a significant foreign policy miscalculation.
In the eyes of the Myanmar public, Modi risks diminishing India’s democratic image and regional positioning and lowering his standing as a global leader by being perceived as aligning with a military junta on par with the authoritarian standards associated with China and Russia.
If India seeks to meaningfully balance Chinese influence in Myanmar, it must engage directly with the people of Myanmar, incorporate accurate on-the-ground realities into its decision-making, and work in close coordination with its democratic allies to support a sustainable resolution of the Myanmar crisis.
Salai Dokhar is an international advocate for Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement, a peace advocate for resistance groups, a leading figure in the India for Myanmar movement, and a young politician from Chin State, Myanmar.
Htar is an advocate for Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement and humanitarian causes.
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